Let’s talk about your experience

Let’s talk about your experience of current reality. Think about what you are passionate about. It might be family, friends, a significant other, a pet, an upcoming vacation, or what you might have for dinner. Different people are passionate about different things. Ask yourself: Why are you passionate about those things? What makes you passionate about them? 

You experience the world, and life in general, through your senses. You see, hear, feel, smell and taste. 

The world sends an incredible amount of information to your physical sensory modalities (eyes, ears, skin, tongue and nose). Not all of that information is accepted, because each one of our senses has human limitations. For example, there are at least 500 million bits of visual information coming your way, every single second. However, only about 500 get through and are processed by your central nervous system. This discrimination process is essential to our survival. Our ancestors had to quickly respond to threats, predators and signals around them. They had no time to observe the beauty of the blue skies, while a hungry lion was lurking in the bushes. 

Take a rapid look around you, for 3 or 4 seconds, and quickly write down what you notice, visually.

Take a look around again, and write down quickly what you missed on, visually, the first time.

Listen. What can you hear, inside the room you’re in?

Listen again. What can you hear, coming from outside the room you’re in?

Listen once again and pay careful attention. What can you hear, in the distance, the farthest sounds? 

What do you feel in your body? On your skin? 

What can you smell?

All of the information you entered above is considered real time sensory perception. It happens at the moment you perceive and recognize it. Now, let’s go one level deeper. Choose one big and clear object in the room you’re in, an object that is not right in front of you. What is it?

Close your eyes and imagine this object. Hold that image for 10 seconds. When you open your eyes again, do NOT look at it again. Describe in detail the image you had experienced while your eyes were closed? 

The image you described is NOT the object itself and it is NOT the perception of the object itself. It is an image in your imagination, that REPRESENTS the memory of the perception of the actual object in your room. 

There’s the object in reality, existing whether you notice it or not. Then, there’s the light coming to your eyes when you take a look at it. Then, there’s the processing of that perception in your brain. Then, when you think about this object, an image pops up in your brain, that represents the original experience of perceiving it in reality. 

Take a good look at this object again and describe details you missed on, when you were only writing about your memory of it.

When you’re using your mind’s eye to recall visual information, we call it a Visual Representational System. The visual modality (seeing an object) is used to recall that information internally, and therefor REPRESENT it to your consciousness. There are 3 main representational systems in NLP – Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. In short, we call them Rep. Systems. Think about your favorite song and let it play in your mind. What song is it and who’s the artist?

How can you be sure it is what you say it is, if you haven’t heard it right now through the speakers or headphones? 

Of course, you ‘know’ the song and you ‘recognize’ the artist, even though it’s being played only inside your head. That’s the Auditory Rep. System in action. When you were very young, how did you differentiate between your father’s voice and a random man on the street? 

What were the characteristics of your father’s voice, that hearing even a single word was enough for you to be certain it’s him? 

Can you imagine pain? You’ve had at least one headache in your life – what was it like having a bad headache? 

Now take a positive experience. How about joy? How did you experience joy in your body?

Love? 

Nervousness? Stage fright? Anxiety?

Compassion? Being accepted?

While it may be more difficult to pinpoint sensations and emotions, we rely on this Kinesthetic Rep. System quite a lot. Imagine driving. You do not drive with your eyes or ears only, but your body in whole is involved. Even if your mind takes you elsewhere, while you’re driving, your kinesthetic rep. system is activated and in hyper-alert to anything around you that may pose danger. Did you ever press the brakes on an intuition, and a second alter a child or a small dog ran to the street in front of you? Can you recall any similar experience, when you reacted intuitively and only after the fact realized how lucky you were? 

On the surface level, you experience the world through your senses. Then, it goes a little deeper, when that information is processed and you are conscious of certain stimuli around you. Then, we went a little deeper, and used the internal rep. systems to recall and re-experience events. You saw, heard and felt experiences that do not happen in real time – they happened today only inside your head. Did they feel real to you?